"Within the Menagerie" works by Melissa Pokorny and Julia Whitney Barnes

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Aug 2007

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Original Post

Posted on:

May 15, 2009

Front Room Gallery is pleased to present ?Within the Menagerie,? an
exhibition featuring sculptures by Melissa Pokorny and an installation
by Julia Whitney Barnes. Both artists explore the contexts in which we
perceive our environment, and the multi-facetted layers of awareness.
Pokorny and Whitney Barnes examine the nature in, and of, our
surroundings, presenting them in a playful menagerie of intriguing
interactions.
Julia Whitney Barnes? installation, ?La Jardinière? is a stunning
vision of an abstracted vertical garden; where authentic-nature and
simulated-nature elements coincide through multilayered planes of wall
painting, representations of tree bark from industrialized wood,
ceramic pressed bark, direct slip casts, floral representations in
ceramic, and collected natural elements. The incorporation and fusion
of these components is Inspired by the urban experience of mediated
nature settings, including elaborately planned parks and gardens, and
through images of exotic places seen through the media. In this
installation Whitney Barnes presents a tribute to endangered tropical
plant species and coral reefs as they are nestled among locally
inspired and collected natural elements.
With her situational sculptural assemblages, Melissa Pokorny explores
causality and contingency as a process, reflecting on how the presence
of one component can affect the narrative potential and physical
interactions within a collection of images and/or objects. Pokorny?s
sculptures present a menagerie of exotic combinations of common and
familiar elements, creating architectural constructions from farcical
building materials. Pokorny is particulary interested in the usage of
life sized statuary animals, and luridly bad (but all the more
beloved) replicas of historical decorative genres in her work. Blasted
narratives are suggested by her sculptures, wherein the familiar is
made strange and the normal boundaries between nature and culture, the
historical and the contemporary are irrevocably radicalized and
compressed.